Beyond carnival capitalism: London 2012 and its legacy of hope

London 2012 provided a key insight into the shifting relationships between global, national and local as residents with no material stake in the Games came together to participate in their success. How might the power of this already-existing ‘commons’ pave the way for an alternative legacy?

Image: ‘The Cardboard Valise’, with thanks to artist Ben Katchor for permission to reproduce here. Click on the cartoon or click here to view it at larger size.

There are a number of grand narratives within which the Olympics might be evaluated, each of which inscribes
the project in a very different value nexus. Perhaps the dominant paradigm on
the Left is that of globalisation. The
Olympics, and sports in general, are
read as symptomatic of larger economic forces at work in society: of
which globalisation is paramount. This is not just down to fact
that the Games are a sporting equivalent
of the United Nations Assembly, but that hosting them is the material sign of
world city status.[i] Their
delivery presupposes a critical mass of facilities, including a networked
infrastructure of transport and communications that is integral to the global
economy; a scale of procurement that only the largest companies with global
resourcing and supply chains can provide and a level of national affluence
sufficient to sustain such a large investment in public resource. Capitalism,
according to this view, is the only Game in town and globalisation is its
middle name.[ii]

This may be good news for the corporate sector, the construction,
tourism and hospitality industries, property developers, and all those who for
one reason or another are ‘going with the flow’; but the benefits of
globalisation do not, in the usual course of events, trickle down as far as the
poorest sections of the host society. London’s pitch for the 2012 Games, with
its priority promise to deliver jobs and prosperity to the East End, staked a
claim to be the exception to this rule, and to be judged within a rather
different economy of worth.

Globalisation and its local dis/contents was very much at the heart of
the 2012 pre-Olympics debate.[iii] There
was considerable overlap between anti-globalisation rhetoric and the arguments
deployed against the Olympics. The nay-sayers pointed to the threat of
gentrification and the pricing of local working class people out of the area as
a subtle form of social, if not ethnic, cleansing; the new shopping city at Stratford,
dominated by global brands, taking trade away from the local street market and
local suppliers; small businesses being unable to compete with the big boys for
the lucrative Olympic contracts; the level of corporate sponsorship required to
make the Games commercially viable destroying any claim to ethical business
practice; and finally the dislocation or erasure of existing cultures and
communities, and the creation of a sanitised and heavily regulated piece of
city.[iv]
Capitalism is here very much the villain of the piece: first it spoils our fun
by importing the spirit of unhealthy competition and the protestant work ethic
into sport, destroying its ludic joys and then it ruins our health courtesy of
MacDonald’s and Coca Cola. Finally, to add insult to injury it uses tax payers
money to subsidise an event that yields mega profits to disreputable private
conglomerates, the likes of BP, Rio Tinto, Adidas, Arcelor-Mittal and Dow.[v] Against
these worst case scenarios the Olygarchs and Olygopolists point to Barcelona
(yet again) as proof positive that it is possible for a cityto stage an economically profitable Games whilst still delivering substantial benefits to its least well off citizens. London 2012 would show that the spirit of Capitalism and Carnival were alive and well and joint partners in the Olympic enterprise.

Whether mobilised for or against the Olympics, the problem with the globalisation
thesis is that it dissolves their specificity, and treats them as an epiphenomenon . The Olympics are
portrayed as a juggernaut flattening everything in its way. They can certainly
often feel like that to those most directly in its path, like the inhabitants
of the hutong in Beijing, or the favelas of Rio, not to mention the squatters of Hackney Wick. Unfortunately, in this scenario the local, and its avatar ‘the community’, is often reified,
portrayed as an immovable object vis a vis the irresistible force of
globalisation in a way that merely mirrors
its effects. But, contrary to what many
of its critics suppose, global capital is not only a homogenising force. It also
articulates differential, even disjunctive, moments of history and culture into
a consensual, commodified nexus of ‘ethnicities’. Ethnicity becomes a source of
social and cultural capital for minorities and aesthetic hybridity ( alias multiculturalism) becomes à la
mode for the affluent middle class at precisely the point when it is pressed into
service to sustain the penetration of market relations into every nook and cranny
of economic life.

Once capitalism moves on from one-size-fits-all methods of
mass production and consumption, it needs to operate through the
diversification of brands. One way to do this is to ‘ethnicise’ commodities by
associating them with an ‘authentic’ mode of local fabrication and a community
of labour supposedly insulated from the globalisation effect: Shetland
pullovers knitted by commuting crofters, genuine Irish malt whisky which tastes
of its native heath courtesy of EU subsidies, Welsh lace knitted by the wives
of ex-miners amidst the dreaming spires of long abandoned pits – these are the
heraldic commodities of the contemporary consumerfest. Capitalism may be indifferent as to the colour
of the hands it sets to work provided they are industrious, but it needs to
create niche markets around difference. And this, in turn, can provide local
leverage for working class and minority ethnic communities in the labour
market.

The creation of ethno-commodities may be the key characteristic of multicultural
capitalism, but, I have argued elsewhere, that multiculturalism itself has
different, essentially pre-capitalist, roots in 18th century English
landed society [vi]. It
belongs to a moral economy ‘where order in variety we see/And where, tho all
things differ, all agree’ (Alexander Pope) . This principle of ‘harmonious
confusion’ today finds its commodified expression in the cultural mash up – the dominant idiom
of the Olympic Ceremonies. Here what appears to be part of a democratising
impulse to overthrow class-bound hierarchies of taste, in fact renders the most disparate cultural practices commensurable; they are all part of the same mix because their critical dissonances both aesthetic and ideological, have been artfully smoothed, or rather,
kitschified, away so they become almost interchangeable. The mash up is free market economics applied to the sphere of
cultural representation, hybridity is laissez faire neo-liberalism in
symbolic action. And kitsch become the preferred aesthetics of bricolage.

In his brilliant comic strip book ‘The
Carboard Valise’ Ben Katchor creates a surreal country of the mind where globalisation and its local discontents have
taken root. The story centres on the
conflict between Emile Delilah, the permanent
tourist who is always seeking to escape from his own culture into someone
else’s, and Elijah Salamis, the supranationalist who believes that all places are the same, and that the only authenticity is to be found in repudiating
any cultural artefact that has a local habitation and a name [vii]. Katchor shows the absurdity of both
multiculturalism with its fetishism
of difference and the abstract
universalism of those who think that humankind can only realise its
‘species consciousness’ by embracing some kind of cultural Esperanto.

What does this analysis imply for the development of an alternative legacy politics in the aftermath of 2012? I think it means that we have to
construct a post-Olympics debate that
goes beyond the current focus on globalisation and its local discontents and instead
build on the fact that the communities of East London have already made a substantial difference to
the delivery of the Games and, in so far as the Olympic Park is concerned, can impact importantly on the legacy. Secondly, we have to recognise that sport has an
intrinsic value and meaning within its own moral/aesthetic economy of worth,
and is not merely the symptomatic expression of wider forces. Finally, the forms
of popular enthusiasm and participation which 2012 made momentarily possible give the
lie to the carefully orchestrated
ecstasies of Carnival capitalism, if only because they remained grounded in the particular
mutualities of everyday life. These countless small acts of generosity and
kindness to strangers, on the part of East Londoners who had no material stake in the Olympics or
in its aspirational hype cannot be
enrolled or recuperated by the rhetorics of ‘the Big society’. Rather, they exemplify
what Marcel Mauss called ‘the
joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in
the public and private feast’[viii]. They amount to what David Graeber has provocatively called ‘actually existing
communism’ and as such they should offer
the Left, so often cast in the role of
party poopers, some encouragement and
even hope for the future [ix].

[ii] See M. Roche. Mega Events and
Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge: 2000, and K. Young (ed.) Global
Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games. Oxford: Elsevier, 2005. See also the contributions to J. Horne and W.
Manzenreiter (eds). Sports Mega-Events. Oxford: Blackwell2004

[iv]
For a critique along these lines see J. Ryan-Collier. Fool’s Gold: How the 2012 Olympics are Selling East London Short. London: New Economies Foundation 2008, and also Perryman, Mark. Why the Olympics are Bad for Us and How They Can Be. OR Books, 2012.

Phil Cohen is managing editor of Livingmaps Review, an on line journal of critical cartography which launches in November. His recent books include On the Wrong Side of the Track:East London and the Post Olympics (Lawrence and Wishart 2013) and Reading Room Only: memoir of a radical bibliophile (Five Leaves 2013). Further information: www.philcohenworks.com and www.livingmaps.org

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